Emphatic

I was listening to the new album “Another Life”. Yeah I know it was released in 2013 and in today’s terms it is old. However once upon a time an album under 12 months was still classed as a new album.

Anyway, i am listening to it and i am not really getting into it. Then a riff that reminds me of the pre-chorus of the song called “Zero” by Smashing Pumpkins blows into my head space. The song in question is “Take Your Place” and I am hooked. It is track nine on the CD.

The only reason why I went this deep into the album was because the same experience happened to me on their previous album.

And finally the album is rocking.

“Forbidden You” comes after and the song “Pretty Handsome Awkward” from The Used comes to mind.

Then it gets even more aggressive with “Remember Me”. It’s got this Disturbed meets Black Label Society groove that is just the way I like it with a flourish of some shred. I had no idea it was the lead single when I listened to it. I found that out after I did some Googling on them.

It’s got a great line in it.

“When the stitches don’t hold and you start to bleed ‘Remember Me'”

It reminds me of the “Unto The Locust” theme from Machine Head, about how people come into your life and end up messing it up, before they leave and move on to another victim.

My ex-drummer was like that. In my mind I tried hard to help him but he kept on making the wrong choices and in the end he made his life difficult and everyone else that was around got dragged into his cesspool of trash.

And then the album ends.

The piece d resistance are the last three songs and I guarantee you that they will go unheard because if someone stumbles across Emphatic due to a playlist algorithm, they will be given the songs that a A&R person believes in. But the audience always has a different viewpoint. We make our own favourites.

We make our own soundtracks and our own memories. So after hearing the last three tracks, I decided to give the other eight tracks a re-listen. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention. But I wanted to pay attention because of the story. You see, Emphatic has a story. And like the best TV shows out there, it is a good narrative.

Emphatic had a record deal with Universal which fell apart. They then recorded their album “Damage” with producer Howard Benson and they were set for a major push in mainstream rock with Atlantic Records behind them.

Then everything changed. Emphatic’s lead singer at the time,Patrick Wilson injured his larynx in a bar fight. No one is sure if someone hit him in the throat or tried to choke him. And timing is everything in music. In this case, it was the worst possible time, with the band starting promotion for their brand new album at the time.

Atlantic Records and Indegoot stuck around. They waited for Wilson to get better however he didn’t and Wilson officially quit the group and Atlantic then dropped them. Guitarist Justin McCain fell into a depression becoming the same person that Wilson became. Then came Toryn Green, formerly of Fuel via a Facebook reach out and eventually a new label in Epochal Artist Records came knocking.

This is how “Another Life” was born. They hooked up with Revolver Magazine (the standard Corporate Deal) to stream the album before it came out.

So with my renewed interest, I started to enjoy some of the other songs like “Time Is Running Out”, “Lights”, “Something’s Never Die”, “The Choice” and “Another Life”.

As I was doing more research I saw that Toryn Green is now out, due to the good old “creative differences” excuse.

And just recently, they signed to Pavement Entertainment and are set to release their new album in late 2014. It’s like the days of old, when bands released an album each year and musicians jumped from band to band.